FPGA supercomputing platforms: A survey

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) inherent reconfigurable nature and their low power consumption have made them so complementary to microprocessors that many are advocating their inclusion in all supercomputing clusters. Today FPGAs are included in few mainstream computer systems for accelerating application specific performance. Among the numerous areas in reconfigurable computing FPGA have been encroaching into, we focus our literature review mainly on the area of high performance computing. Moving from FPGA general features to the evolution of FPGA supercomputing architecture, its roadmap, we reference selected applications lately developed for accelerating large simulation tasks using FPGA based supercomputers before presenting concluding remarks on challenges yet to be overcome.

[1]  Scott Hauck,et al.  Reconfigurable computing: a survey of systems and software , 2002, CSUR.

[2]  Tim Güneysu,et al.  Enhancing COPACOBANA for advanced applications in cryptography and cryptanalysis , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.

[3]  Justin P. Haldar,et al.  Accelerating advanced mri reconstructions on gpus , 2008, CF '08.

[4]  Gerald Estrin,et al.  Organization of computer systems: the fixed plus variable structure computer , 1960, IRE-AIEE-ACM '60 (Western).

[5]  Tarek A. El-Ghazawi,et al.  System-level parallelism and throughput optimization in designing reconfigurable computing applications , 2004, 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2004. Proceedings..

[6]  Xiaoxiong Xiong,et al.  Modeling studies of the MODIS solar diffuser attenuation screen and comparison with on-orbit measurements , 2004, SPIE Optics + Photonics.

[7]  Volodymyr V. Kindratenko,et al.  A case study in porting a production scientific supercomputing application to a reconfigurable computer , 2006, 2006 14th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines.

[8]  Tarek A. El-Ghazawi,et al.  Wavelet spectral dimension reduction of hyperspectral imagery on a reconfigurable computer , 2004, Proceedings. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Field- Programmable Technology (IEEE Cat. No.04EX921).

[9]  Peter M. Athanas,et al.  Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing , 2007, EURASIP J. Embed. Syst..

[10]  Gerald Estrin,et al.  Reconfigurable Computer Origins: The UCLA Fixed-Plus-Variable (F+V) Structure Computer , 2002, IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput..

[11]  Eric J. Kelmelis,et al.  Accelerated modeling and simulation with a desktop supercomputer , 2006, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[12]  Tarek A. El-Ghazawi,et al.  The Promise of High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing , 2008, Computer.

[13]  Laxmikant V. Kalé,et al.  Scalable molecular dynamics with NAMD , 2005, J. Comput. Chem..

[14]  Ron Sass,et al.  Quantifying Effective Memory Bandwidth of Platform FPGAs , 2007 .

[15]  Ian Grout,et al.  Digital Systems Design with FPGAs and CPLDs , 2008 .

[16]  Maya Gokhale,et al.  Matched Filter Computation on FPGA, Cell and GPU , 2007, 15th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM 2007).

[17]  Reiner W. Hartenstein,et al.  A decade of reconfigurable computing: a visionary retrospective , 2001, Proceedings Design, Automation and Test in Europe. Conference and Exhibition 2001.

[18]  Eric J. Kelmelis,et al.  Modeling and simulation of nanoscale devices with a desktop supercomputer , 2006, SPIE Optics + Photonics.

[19]  Scott Hauck,et al.  Reconfigurable Computing: The Theory and Practice of FPGA-Based Computation , 2007 .